Work on the next book is moving along. As I’m writing it, I find myself doing searches on the internet to try to describe items accurately, as well as laying out a situation that could actually happen in this scenario. When I do this, I think about the irony that, if the events the books are based on truly happened, that would no longer be an option for information. We live in an age almost completely dependent on electricity and technology. We don’t have to go to the library to do research. It’s at our fingertips on the worldwide web, on devices we can fit in our pockets. Do they even make encyclopedias anymore?

So, we go along in our daily lives, with all this technology around us. We don’t pause to think about it until we lose it. What do you do when your power goes out? You grab your phone to see what’s going on, because the power company has an app that reports outages to you. A power outage doesn’t affect your phone, after all. But what if it did? What if, in the space of a second, you lost every electronic device you have?

Where would you get water if you turned the faucet on and nothing came out? Water is the number one, most important thing you need to survive. How much food do you have in your house, right now? Could you cook without a microwave or an oven? Do you carry cash with you, just in case? If you do have these things, how would you keep other people from taking them from you if said people didn’t have them? If you don’t do anything else for you and your family, keep at least a week’s worth of non-perishable food in your home. Don’t forget your pets. Keep enough water for each person to have a gallon per day for at least two weeks.

If you don’t think anything can happen in this country to disrupt your daily life, look at the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. Oh, you don’t live on the coast? You live in the middle of the country? Guess what, you live on an active fault line. An earthquake can do a lot more damage than a hurricane, over a much wider area, that could cut you off from everything for weeks, if not months. You would have no services and possibly no help.

It would cost you a few extra bucks a week to build up a cache of food. If you ever have to use it, it would be priceless.